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Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

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Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#361

Post by 5d41402abc4b »

cyphar wrote: post #51
josephcsible wrote: post #39

This seems like the kind of technology that could make the problem described in https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.en.html a lot worse. Do you have any plans for making sure it doesn't get used for that?

I'm Aleksa, one of the founding engineers. We will share more about this in the coming months but this is not the direction nor intention of what we are working on. The models we have in mind for attestation are very much based on users having full control of their keys. This is not just a matter of user freedom, in practice being able to do this is far more preferable for enterprises with strict security controls. I…

What was it that the Google founders said about not adding advertisements to Google search?

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#362

Post by faust201 »

teiferer wrote: post #217
cyphar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Aleksa, one of the founding engineers. We will share more about this in the coming months but this is not the direction nor intention of what we are working on. The models we have in mind for attestation are very much based on users having full control of their keys. This is not just a matter of user freedom, in practice being able to do this is far more preferable for enterprises with strict security controls. I…

> I've been a FOSS guy my entire adult life, I wouldn't put my name to something that would enable the kinds of issues you describe. Until you get acquired, receive a golden parachute and use it when realizing that the new direction does not align with your views anymore. But, granted, if all you do is FOSS then you will anyway have a hard time keeping evil actors from using your tech for evil things. Might as well g…

You could tell this sort of insinuation to anyone. Including you.

Argument should be technical.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#363

Post by unixhero »

stogot wrote: post #337
coppsilgold wrote: post #331

Remote attestation only works because your CPU's secure enclave has a private key burned-in (fused) into it at the factory. It is then provisioned with a digital certificate for its public key by the manufacturer. Every time you perform an attestation the public key (and certificate) is divulged which makes it a unique identifier, and one that can be traced to the point of sale - and when buying a used device, a poin…

I’m not sure I understand the threat model for this. Why would I need to worry about my enclave being identifiable? Or is this a business use case? Or why buy used devices if this is a risk?

At this point these are just English sentences. I am not worried about this threat model at all.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#364

Post by tocariimaa »

getcrunk wrote: post #56

systemd solved/improved a bunch of things for linux, but now the plan seems to be to replace package management with image based whole dist a/b swaps. and to have signed unified kernel images. this basically will remove or significantly encumber user control over their system, such that any modification will make you loose your "signed" status and ... boom! goodbye accessing the internet without an id pottering recen…

We warned you that systemd was just the beginning.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#365

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

avadodin wrote: post #263
cwillu wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It very clearly is restrictive of software freedom. I've never suffered from an evil maid breaking into my house to access my computer, but I've _very_ frequently suffered from corporations trying to prevent me from doing what I wish with my own things. We need to push back on this notion that this sort of thing was _ever_ for the end-user's benefit, because it's not.

To play devil's advocate, I don't think most people would be fine with their car ramming into a military base after an unfriendly firmware update. However, I agree that the risks to individuals and their freedoms stemming from these technologies outweigh the benefits in most cases.

If a malicious update can be pushed because of some failure in the signature verification checks (which already exist), what makes you think the threat actor won’t have access to signing keys?

This is not what attestation is even seeking to solve.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#366

Post by jjmarr »

bee_rider wrote: post #279
blibble wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only use debian pulseaudio I had to fight every single day, with my "exotic" setup of one set of speakers and a headset with pipewire, I've never had to even touch it systemd: yesterday I had a network service on one machine not start up because the IP it was trying to bind to wasn't available yet the dependencies for the .service file didn't/can't express the networking semantics correctly this isn't some hacked u…

PipeWire is like 10 years newer than PulseAudio. It probably had a chance to learn some lessons! IIRC before PulseAudio we had to mess around with ALSA directly (memory hazy, it was a while ago). It could be a bit of a pain.

I installed Gentoo in 2014 and getting PulseAudio working was much easier than ALSA. It was also much better.

I get ALSA followed the Unix philosophy of doing one thing but I want my audio mixer to play multiple sounds at once.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#367

Post by cferry »

Please don't bring attestation to common Linux distributions. This technology, by essence, moves trust to a third party distinct of the user. I don't see how it can be useful in any way to end users like most of us here. Its use by corporations has already caused too much damage and exclusion in the mobile landscape, and I don't want folks like us becoming pariahs in our own world, just because we want machines we bought to be ours...

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#368

Post by uecker »

ahepp wrote: post #355
dijit wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the parent commenter is completely right. The attestation portion of those systems is happening on locked down devices, and if you gain ownership of the devices they no longer attest themselves. This is the curse of the duopoly of iOS and Android. BankID in Sweden will only run with one of these devices, they used to offer a card system but getting one seems to be impossible these days. So you're really…

as you say, a lot of this stuff is already happening. Won’t it be good to have a FOSS attestation stack that breaks the iOS/android duopoly?

No

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#369

Post by ahepp »

LooseMarmoset wrote: post #278
awithrow wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to flame it you might as well point out something concrete you don't like about it.

"The OS configuration and state (i.e. /etc/ and /var/) must be encrypted, and authenticated before they are used. The encryption key should be bound to the TPM device; i.e system data should be locked to a security concept belonging to the system, not the user." See Android; or, where you no longer own your device, and if the company decides, you no longer own your data or access to it.

https://0pointer.net/blog/authenticated-boot-and-disk-encryp...

Yes, system data should be locked to the system with a TPM. That way your system can refuse to boot if it's been modified to steal your user secrets.

Re: Lennart Poettering, Christian Brauner founded a new company

#370

Post by [deleted] »

blibble wrote: post #252
jorvi wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like "at least one real IP address is available" or "time has been synced" "network-online.target is a target that actively waits until the network is “up”, where the definition of “up” is defined by the network management software. Usually it indicates a configured, routable IP address of some kind. Its primary purpose is to actively delay activation of services until the network has been set up." For time sync ch…

it's the "usually" that's the problem this service (untouched by me) had: After=local-fs.target network-online.target remote-fs.target time-sync.target but it was still started without an IP address, and then failed to bind just like this sort of problem: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4880#issuecomment-... the entire thing is unreliable and doesn't act like you'd expect > Or you can do something with Exec…

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